“It cannot be done all at once. To overpower vertigo - the keeper of the abyss- one must tame it, cautiously.”

“We must avoid coming to too close quarters with life. It is a slender crust over which you must walk without bearing down too hard. Hit your heel into it and you make a hole in which you will disappear. True philosophy has never consisted in probing all problems, but often on the contrary eluding them. We are skirting an abyss: beware of vertigo.”

“...we are of a broad, Karamazovian nature--and this is what I am driving at--capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, an abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, and abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation.”

“I was wild and tame and pulled into shreds and crushed into being all at once.”

“Cannot a Beast be tamed?”

“What must be done must be done, whatever the price, the cost, the pain. One day we all must walk through fire.”